NEW YORK — The Miami Heat weren’t at full strength during Thursday’s loss to the Knicks, and a day later in Brooklyn the team found out before tip-off that it would be even more shorthanded against the streaking Nets.

Shane Battier and Mario Chalmers both sat against the Knicks, and will do so again in Brooklyn. After Dwyane Wade logged 39 minutes against New York, he said before the game that the pain in his knees was too much for him to play against the Nets.

That’s three of Miami’s five starters that will be out against a Nets team that has won four straight while dealing with plenty of injury issues of their own. But Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra has said more than once that Wade will be essentially day-to-day all year long, in order to preserve his knees for another extended campaign that he hopes will end in a fourth straight trip to the NBA Finals.

“That’s just the way it has to be,” Spoelstra said of Wade’s ongoing, gametime decision status. “We’ve put together a very disciplined structured routine where we evaluate him every single day. If he feels good and passes the tests — a very specific evaluation — then he can play. If he can’t, then he doesn’t.”

With what seems like an epidemic of injuries to key players ongoing this season, most recently with Eric Bledsoe and Jrue Holiday going down for extended periods of time, it may be tempting to be even more cautious than usual. But Spoelstra said any decisions made in Miami are independent of what the league as a whole may be experiencing.

“For us, we’re not looking across the league and making our decisions based on that,” he said. “You cringe, certainly, when you see a player get hurt. And the news we just heard about the last two players that got hurt, you know, it’s horrible. You feel for them and their teams.

“With us, we want to make sure that we’re taking care of it so you don’t have a setback. In particular with Shane and Rio, that’s what you don’t want. So even if you take another few days longer than they think they might need, if you don’t have a setback, then everything’s great. A setback, and then it’s another two weeks — that starts to add up, and now you’re really playing from behind. We just want to be smart about it.”

Managing the process is obviously important, and sitting Wade on one night of a back-to-back set for the fifth time this season, even when coming off of a loss in which the team didn’t play particularly well, is a great example of that. But you can only realistically prepare for so much.

“Ultimately there’s an incredible unpredictability about it,” Spoelstra said. “All you can do is knock on wood, cross your fingers.”